Life/Death
REM cycle 1 Brother
He feels as though he lives with his eyes closed and without a world beyond the darkness under his eyelids. Something is pulling at him. It is like an ultrasound, sending small tinnying vibrations trying to reach him and betray all his secrets of being inchoate.
He is their creation. They are intently watching his cells divide to see if he will emerge as expected, or be a surprise. He will be a long account well accounted for in their lab-books. He will teach them what grows from the things they threw into their growing tube. They know that he is still smudged around the edges, nothing as what he should be. Yet.
His fingers and toes are nubby with how unfinished he is, and someone can see. He hates it.
There is someone done already on the floor below him. He can see the boy, all grown up, from between the slats of his incubator walls. He can see that the boy has bright blue hair, stiffly lashed up and down like licks of lightning. He can see that the boy's has balls for joints instead of hinges, because he can see the boy moving across the in swirling twists, his hips and knees pin-wheeling and yo-yoing and carousel-ing in dizzying bursts of rainbow-brite speed.
The boy laughs, and it is so very obnoxiously loud. It makes his still-embryonic brother in the black water nauseous. The boy is going away soon, but that doesn't upset him. The boy is content, and it shows in how he moves. His feet are miniscule, in dainty baby's shoes, and they are laden with terrible power. They make a booming crack, like the tiny tip of a whip.
His unborn brother watches as he exalts, his kitten paw hands thrown up. His eyes gleam golden in his face, something like stars glittering furiously in them. He is still healthy, no matter what they say. He breaks everything that he touches. They split open and regurgitate all the life he puts into them.
His life is death. His death is life.
His world is not ready for him, and he needs to go away now—
-Now.
His younger brother the fetus watches him go, slipping and sliding into the distance with his marbles-for-bones. He wants to tell his brother that his leaving would be a waste; he is desperate for him to stay. His mouth has not formed yet, so he can't.
He must remain, now that his brother has run away.
REM Cycle 2 Mother
Their mother floats down as a feet-first ghost to greet him. She is very pale and small as if she is a new child herself without first breath drawn. If she were a whale, she would be coming in "breach"—opposite of how she was supposed to come, the tail instead of head. If someone doesn't look out for her, she will have a hard time making it to the surface and taking her first lungful of air. Correction: she will die.
Like him. Like he died, because he came the wrong way. He was just a little lump of meat with crystal spikes of ice piercing his cell walls.
But someone must have been watching out for her, because she is here enough to look at him. Her head swivels around on her thin neck. He stares back at her.
She never gave birth to either of them, so her stomach is a slim flesh cutlet lying flat and girly-soft between her little hips. Her son thinks that perhaps it was for the best that he came out of her before he got bigger. He'd fallen far away from her and they'd both been safe. Otherwise he might have been like an acorn growing on an oak branch, and dragged her down to the earth.
-No, she died, she hit the earth, and the force of her fall broke her apart. With her roots flailing in the air, asphyxiating, dying—the crash scattered her acorns, she shrivels as he is born—
-The first time she dies she is born. She is falling, falling through the sky and on impact she jolts right out of who she was. She ricochets on impact and crashes into something so bright it blinds him to watch it because she loves it like an a bee loves a flower, like a flower loves water, like the water loves the sea because no matter how many tiny splintered droplets they try to smash her into, she will always run down, run as fast as she can to be together with him, join as if they have never been apart, falling, falling, like rain, clean rain without yellow poison, her sky clean, into him—
-He is a rock salt pillar. He grinds down the ice with his own harsh chemical being, back to the way he was before they met. He does it to give her enough traction to walk on with slow, reluctant feet. She does not run or fly anymore. He won't let her. She still flows with him, but she is starting to feel his grit, his harshness, cloud her up from the inside her instead of her clean pouring into him-
-He is made of ramen and ice cream again, of thick-knit cable sweaters he buys for her to wear over black tights, of manga volumes he makes the others let her read first. She doesn't know how, but he is also a haggard face in the hood of a sealskin jacket, his cheek against a rifle softly lit by lamplight. He is also the thorns snapping into the skin of her back as he holds her, skin to skin, and she understands with him that there is another life between their bodies now.
Their son watches her waft through the darkness, dead after all. She is just a sluggish corpse being lugged around by a current. He watches her sink down to him, a white and amorphous beluga in her billowing dress. He looks her in her double-hatched, cross-pupil eyes.
"Hi, chicken shit!" she says, bright and calming.
REM Cycle 3 Father
He is scared of his father because his father is an unnatural colorless spear of a human being. He is tall and sharp, and his existence pierces clear through others' to leave them nothing as he steps through.
His father is cut from ivory. He is narrow and hard, something made of shame and blood. He is a bone of white death.
White death, his father whispers to him. Not black death: void and negation, defeat. Not gray death: of what once lived rotting away its complexity little by little, a pungent necrosis.
White, purity. White of a blinding sun in a sky with no atmosphere to muddy the light. White of whipped air trapped in frozen water. Breath, suspended.
That whiteness is as much parent to him as his mother, a dark haired whippet girl chasing after imaginary rabbits she saw in the clouds, and his father, the ominous pillar standing at his post and watching her. The whiteness had been his umbilical cord when he had none. It had kept him in storage until he could be delivered to his father, the invoice a small paper plane gripped in his hand.
Sleeping in white ice had been a gentle rest; the sudden thawing a shock; and the arrival at his father's door a birth so painful he wished he would die from it. His father had put up bars of steel as unbendable as himself to hold his son.
In the cage, he had been afraid that he would warp from skeleton deformities and his muscles would atrophy and melt away his flesh. Then he would become nothing but a tower of cruel bone shard, like his father. He had ripped his skin on the locks and chains trying to slip out. As he bounded away, he had looked over his shoulder. His once-captor had been standing there as cruel and unbreakable of an obelisk as ever. I will never leave your sightline, he seemed to say. I will never fall.
The cold wind of the north had swept his father clean and bare like the tundra, and what was left was hard edged. His son had been afraid that, like the permafrost deathly still of his birthplace, this would never change. But that fear shrank with the terror of seeing his father impaled through his collarbone.
It was a lie after all. He was never unbreakable; there is the horror of the limp rubberiness in limbs as he goes slack. The powder white of his surface cracks open and out gushes the weak red blood his son did not know he had.
This, because his father had only been his sweet white death extended. He had meant to keep him frozen longer and secret away from the world longer. The nuclear engine in his brain had been switched off, and his father had tried to keep it taped down.
He sees his father now for what he is. A puppet with his strings cut. Left to stew in the blood of his family. Made this way by masters who laughed at how he tried to stand anyways. How stiff he had tried to look, and how he tried to stand unyielding so that the ones he loved would believe he could protect them.
His father looks over one more time with his eye melting from the heat of his wounds. Breathe and be still, my little one, my pet too sleepy in his cage at home to run outside and savage the strangers who frighten him, he seems to say.
"No," he answers, and he feels himself stirring loose as an ancient monster from the deep, rising out of the white sea-ice.
"No," his brother, his mother, and his copy agree.
REM Cycle 5 Self
Akito wakes up.
A/N: Stream of consciousness shiz. Rereading the story of Gazelle's death and Akito's birth in the Arctic inspired how the many persons and personas are shuffled between a few bodies integrated life and death. Is Lind a doppel of Kaito or Gazelle anyways? Then again, Gazelle was blank slate when she met Kaito and so became like Kaito, which was its own rebirth, and so on with the ambiguities. Agito is not here because he wasn't really developed at all in these chapters.